The importance of knowing our history
9th May 2022 · 0 Comments
With The Louisiana Weekly approaching its Centennial in serving its readership, this milestone and the annual celebration of Cinco de Mayo having just been celebrated it is an appropriate time to reference the history of the New Orleans-Haiti-Veracruz connection to both of pending and annual event.
The history of Haitian-Louisianans is integral to the Battle of Puebla on May 5, 1862. The Haitian Revolution sparked and subsequently aided other independence movements, such as Simón Bolívar and the liberation of Venezuela, Columbia, Brazil, and Bolivia.
In Bolívar’s early battles with the Spanish and Portuguese, his troops suffered several losses. Born into a wealthy Venezuelan family and having received an elite education, Bolivar fled Venezuela in 1815 after the Second Republic loss. After being rejected by the other European colonizers, he found refugee in Haiti.
Bolívar and his army received sanctuary and were welcomed by President Alexandre Pétion (first president of Haiti) who invoked Article 44 of the Haitian 1816 Constitution declaring Haiti was free and therefore would provide citizenship to all non-white foreigners. Not only did Pétion feed and house Bolívar and his troops, he also provided rifles, ammunition, a printing press and hundreds of Haitian soldiers and sailors to go forth and end slavery and the slave trade.
Pétion’s Republic of Haiti became the free soil of revolutionary activities for the Western Hemisphere, including Mexico and South America. President Pétion’s one request of Bolívar, now known as “The Liberator,” was that the Latin and South American countries that he liberated would not engage in slavery.
According to famed Haitian-American journalist Joel Dreyfuss, Bolívar and his successors did not completely live up to his promise.
Haiti’s successful revolution came at a great cost, not only for its people and the economic disruption, but the country was required to pay $30 million in gold for Reparations to France in order to be recognized as a sovereign nation.
After the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, some “free people of color” believed that they would be unable to retain the liberties that were attained primarily under Spanish Rule. Simply stated, they were suspicious of keeping their freedoms under the United States Government. Therefore, over 100 families moved from Louisiana to Veracruz, Mexico where these Haitian-Americans befriended attorney Benito Juárez. When Juárez had to flee Mexico because of his revolutionary activities, he took refugee in New Orleans with the families of the Haitian-Americans he knew in his home country.
On July 17, 1861, Juárez, then President, issued a moratorium suspending all payments of foreign debt for the next two years. The French under Emperor Napoleon III responded by attacking Veracruz. On May 5, 1862, the Haitian-trained Mexicans and Haitian-born New Orleanians, despite being outmanned two to one, decisively defeated the French invaders.
There are many families today in New Orleans that are descendants of those Haitians who fled to Veracruz. One very prominent name is Venerated Henriette De Lille-Sarpy. In 1999, a group from Veracruz visited the Sisters of Holy Family Mother House in New Orleans tracing their ancestry.
It is also important to note that The Louisiana Weekly was founded in 1925 by Constant C. Dejoie, Sr., who was a New Orleanian of Haitian descent. He was also founder of Unity Life Insurance Company, which was one of the largest — if not the largest — black-owned and operated insurance companies in America. It was subsequently sold to North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company, making it the largest black-owned insurance company in US.
Having been popularized by alcohol companies as a day of celebration around the United States since the 1980s, Cinco de Mayo is a crucial link among the Histories of Mexico, Haiti, and Louisiana.
The site CreoleGen.org has done an extensive series on the Dejoie’s of New Orleans: Part 1- https://www.creolegen.org/2015/07/
23/the-dejoies-of-new-orleans-part-1-of-2/; and Part 2- https://www.creolegen.org/2015/
08/20/the-dejoies-of-new-orleans-part-2-of-2/
Further, the Doley Family plot in St. Louis No.1 Cemetery, one of oldest continuously-operated cemeteries in America, has a monument erected and engraved in the languages of English, Amharic and Haitian-Creole that honors historic African Americans of Louisiana, many of whom were of Haitian descent. It must be remembered that in 1810, half of the population of New Orleans was Haitian.
– The Honorable Ambassador
Harold E. Doley Jr.
This article originally published in the May 9, 2022 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
